U.S. CD sales up by 10 percent

The official CD sales figures in the Unites States showed that the slump in CD sales that has laster for five years now, has finally ended. The CD sales figures for the first half of year 2004 were 10.2 percent higher than they were in first half of 2003.

Despite the jump, the sales figures were still down 4.3 percent compared to the first half of year 2001, according to the statistics released by the RIAA. Music industry analysts said that the rise in CD sales is down the fact that people are once again being more interested about the music, mostly due the iPod phenomenom in the US and also because music industry has finally started improving its products, by offering more music outside traditional "top 40 -format". This can also be found out from the fact that by comparing the top 50 CDs of year 2003's first half to the top 50 CDs in 2004's first half, the sales figures were down by 16.7 percent -- a clear indication that while people buy more CDs, they buy from wider selection than before.

Also, the sales of DVD music videos jumped by whopping 100 percent, from 5.6 million units in 2003 to 11.2 million units this year.

9 user comments

Yeah, funny that. The interesting thing is that it is only the manufactured, heavily advertised trash in the top 50 that seems to be losing ground. Perhaps if the big producers focused on making _good quality music_ rather than trying to punish potential buyers, people wouldn't be so interested in just knocking off the single good track from a CD.
But hey, what would I know. I'm not an overpaid recording company executive. Try-before-you-buy has never helped no-one never. Ever.

Surely, the RIAA will point out that only with their tireless campaign of finding the pirates and bringing them to justice did the music industry turn around and become more profitable again. It will only bolster their litigious efforts.

Odd that the Media News Group who owns the LA Daily News (source of the story) plugs ipod specifically & then contains this quote: "Piracy, both online and on the street, continues to hit the music community hard, and thousands have lost their jobs because of it," Mitch Bainwol, chairman and chief executive officer of the RIAA, said in a statement." I don't advocate piracy but I just can't stand this big business convergence bullshit.

Its just like a rubber band, streatch it out and soon it breaks and snaps you where it hurts. They've bullied us for too long and now the justice system is investigating them as well. It will come to haunt them for the rest of their naturial lives and the generations of newcommers to the organization. They refuse to make music available for a deacent rate we can all be happy with. Better yet Napster has DRM files that you can Download and play for $9.95/Mo. Great idea acept the recording insustry doesn't want it to be that simple. they'd rather call us names and say we are unreasonable. Fact is that they are the ones that want to war with us.

Their business model is fast coming to an end. With the digital age, more and more artists are bypassing RIAA completely and very happily so. This will translate into less and less of the future "greats' even setting foot in a big label office.
They're slowly but surely reaping what they've sown.

I hope what the gentleman from Napster said is true and that every record label will be forced to allow music to be available on line on the monthly subscription services. When that happens you can be sure that it will be fair and a flat rate of like $9 for all the songs you want per month. Can't wait for that to happen and for all the sillyness to come to a stop. Not that Bush won the election who knows. Americans are really idiots indeed.